Senior Program Associate

Location: Remote in the U.S. In-person/hybrid options in Chicago, IL and Washington, DC

Travel: 30-40% to U.S. election offices and conferences (informed by public health guidelines )

Type: Full-time

Start date: January 2025

Application deadline: November 6, 2024 at 11:59 pm ET OR once we reach a cap of 300 applicants, whichever comes first - please apply early!

When you think about elections, you might think about popular candidates, “I voted” stickers, and all sorts of paperwork and deadlines. But behind the scenes are thousands of election officials in state and local governments who are working hard to make sure ballots are counted and voices are heard.

To serve every community and make democracy work, these officials need 21st-century tools and training. You can help them get it!

CTCL’s Professional Development Team (PDT) is hiring a Senior Program Associate to develop and deliver training courses and easy-to-use tools that advance the tech and communication capabilities of election officials. If you care about democracy, if you believe in the importance of public service, and if you love to exceed expectations, this is the job for you. You’ll report to an Instructional Design Manager in the Government Services Department.

Responsibilities

• Training - Deliver learning and development resources that are engaging, informative, and advance the adoption of best practices. Travel to facilitate workshops and trainings, lead live webinars, and develop asynchronous online learning experiences.

• Curriculum development and improvement - Create plans for courses and workshops and develop course participant guides, slide presentations, and evaluations that address the professional development needs of election officials. Suggest, hone, and evaluate new approaches to instructional design, such as alternative training formats, materials, or participant engagement practices.

• Research - With the support of the Government Services team, identify training needs of election officials through industry research, like reports, case studies, and interviews. Surface and document best practices that help election offices meet high standards of success.

• Partner communication and collaboration - Regularly connect with CTCL coworkers, state and local election officials, professional associations, and other professionals in the field to build and maintain productive, ongoing relationships and successfully initiate or implement strategic training partnerships.

• Commitment to priority audiences - Develop training content for election officials that prioritizes voters with limited access to the election system. This includes voters who are newly eligible, have limited English proficiency, live with disabilities, or are from communities that are impacted by the digital divide or historical disenfranchisement due to race.

• Project coordination - Oversee multi-course training series and other major projects by setting goals, creating project plans, coordinating coworkers and partners, and monitoring progress.

• Area of special focus: conference presentations - Represent the Professional Development Team at conferences for local election officials as our primary conference traveler. This includes creating and delivering unique training content for live audiences in a conference setting, building connections with conference attendees, and soliciting participation from attendees in programs and resources offered by CTCL. Travel is estimated at 30-40% of work time.

Qualifications

A successful candidate would have at least some experience in all of the following areas.

• Dynamic instruction - You have experience designing engaging, well-researched trainings rooted in principles of adult learning, and can deliver those trainings concisely, clearly, and in a variety of mediums (in-person and online). You evaluate the effectiveness of your trainings to identify and implement improvements.

• Relationship building - You are comfortable meeting new people and making connections between your work. You have experience representing an organization at public events, communicating organization mission, answering questions, and pursuing partnerships with a target audience.

• Strong spoken and written communication skills - You can present complex concepts in a way that is easy to understand. You document and share project plans that promote alignment with collaborators.

• Equity consciousness - You have skills and experiences that help you understand people who face barriers accessing public services. For instance, you may be multilingual with experience working with native speakers of a language other than English.

• Independent time management and coordination - You are thoughtful with your time management and pay attention to detail. This shows in the quality of work you produce. You have experience managing your own work and coordinating with collaborators in order to plan and finish projects within a set amount of time.

• Curiosity - You are committed to learning new things and developing new skills.

Additionally, eligible candidates must live in the United States and be eligible to work in the United States.

Knowledge of election administration is a plus, but not a requirement.

Hiring process

• Click apply to upload your resume and answer some initial questions. (Only applications submitted through this careers site will be considered.) This should take approximately 30 minutes.

• We will email a status update to every applicant by Tuesday, November 12. Please check your spam folder if you don’t see an email from us. If you are selected to move forward in our process, we will invite you to submit a sample of your previous work, along with thoughts about your approach to that work, to demonstrate some of your qualifications.

• If you are selected to move forward to the final phases of our process, a video interview and reference check will be conducted to determine if you are the best fit for the position. The interview will take up to 1 hour.

About the Center for Tech and Civic Life

We are a nonpartisan nonprofit that connects Americans with the information they need to be civically engaged, connects local election officials with tools and training to make our elections more professional, inclusive, and secure, and advocates for increased government funding for election departments across the country.

To date, we’ve published civic datasets that answer the questions “What’s on my ballot?” and “Who represents me?” which have been accessed over 300 million times. We’ve trained thousands of election officials, serving 170 million U.S. voters, on topics like election website design and cybersecurity best practices. Our advocacy efforts have led to $468 million in new state & federal appropriations for election administration.

The Center for Tech and Civic Life is proud to be an Equal Opportunity Employer. We encourage people of all races, colors, religions, national origins, sexual orientations, genders, sexes, ages, abilities, branches of military service, and political party affiliations to apply.